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Seeking Dawn is a surprisingly large and ambitious VR game from the developers at Multiverse. While w had some mixed feelings about it in our review that went live earlier this week, there are some really strong positives to this shooter that will resonate with a lot of people. For starters, it offers a heft campaign with solid co-op gameplay and lots of areas to explore while gunning down dangerous aliens.

It’s also a pretty tough game with intricate crafting and survival systems. So now that Seeking Dawn is finally out into the wild that means thousands of intrepid space marines are about to embark on their journey. But it’s dangerous out there, so take this list of tips!

There Are Lots of Options In The Settings

Once you get through all of the intro calibration steps you can open up the full Settings menu and really dig into the options. In addition to offering both full trackpad/joystick locomotion there’s a teleport system as well. You can tweak your rotation settings (incremental or smooth) as well as the rotation and movement speed.

On top of movement options you can customize the HUD opacity (a lot of people found it intrusive or claustrophobic, but I personally liked having the helmet in my FOV because it was more immersive.) The point is that it’s a pretty customizable experience and you can really tweak it to be good for your tastes.

It’s Better With Friends

Like most things, Seeking Dawn is better with some friends. The title supports up to four players in co-op and has a really great drop-in, drop-out system so that you can leave your game lobby open while you play and let people join you at-will. Plus, when you pick a save file, you can choose to either load it in single player or multiplayer, which means all of your progress carries over in your game between modes.

The in-game animations for your co-op buddies need some work in terms of tracking arms and legs and not having players look like distorted aliens, but at least the netcode and gameplay is good. Certainly helps make the more tedious parts of the game (and there are plenty) feel less monotonous.

Stockpile Resources

Within the first hour or so of Seeking Dawn you’ll find two resource gathering tools — one that lets you break up rocks for ore and one that lets you chew up trees for wood. As soon as you get these, if you have the patience, I’d recommend immediately backtracking through all of the zones you’ve explored already and grabbing as many resources as you can.

The reason I say that is because eventually you’ll hit a point where you need something particular and if you don’t happen to have it already, it’s a huge pain to find specific resources. There is no map system to tell you where resources spawn at all or which zones to search in, so it can be frustrating if you didn’t preemptively stockpile.

Ever wanted to be a superhero? Better yet, how about a Marvel superhero? With Marvel Powers United VR you can do just that. This promising new VR game lets you step into the shoes of your favorite comic book characters and team up with friends to save the world over and over again.

What is it?

Marvel Powers United VR is essentially a co-op brawler. You team up with up to four friends, each of whom chooses from a number of different heroes, and then take on individual missions that are around 10 – 20 minutes long. You’ll be tasked with objectives like defending certain objects and must then hold off scores of enemies, including occasional boss characters based on comic book villains.

The game is played from a first-person perspective, and each hero has their own unique abilities to play with. Thor can throw his mystical hammer, Mjolnir, for example, while Hulk’s super strength allows him to easily bat away enemies.

Heroes

A total of nine playable heroes have been confirmed for the game so far, with six more to be revealed before launch.

Black Panther – As king of Wakanda, Black Panther a.k.a. T’Challa utilizes superhuman strength gained from the mystical heart-shaped herb, paired with a suit made out of an unbreakable metal named vibranium, to slash away at his foes.

Rocket Raccoon – Born from sadistic experiments, Rocket may be a little on the short side but he more than makes up for it with the size of his guns. A favorite among the Guardians of the Galaxy, he’ll make short work of those in his way.

Deadpool – Best known as the Merc with the Mouth, Wade Wilson is a hired gun that doesn’t know when to keep his trap shut. Mixing attacks up between guns and his trademark katanas makes him no joke on the battlefield, though.

Captain Marvel – Arguably one of the most powerful heroes in the Marvel universe, Carol Danvers can take to the skies and emit deadly energy beams that will cut through the competition.

The Hulk – This is one time that you’ll definitely like him when he’s angry. When Bruce Banner loses control, The Incredible Hulk steps out of the shadows, bringing his unparralled strength with him. That’s bad news for the bad guys.

Crystal – A member of a race of superpowered beings known as The Inhumans, Crystal has one of the most unique powersets in the game. Utilizing her mastery of fire and water, she has great defensive capabilities to aid objectives.

Black Bolt – The leader of the Inhumans and king the Attilan, Black Bolt is cursed with a voice so powerful it can topple buildings. He’s usually confined to silence, but out on the battlefield he’s able to let loose.

Thor – God of Thunder, Son of Odin and… strongest Avenger? Thor wields his mighty hammer, Mjolnir, to smash through foes with little effort. As if hitting things with a hammer weren’t enough, he can also summon lightning to aid his cause. Handy!

The augmented reality industry has seen huge growth in the first half of 2018, according to a report from The Venture Reality Fund (The VR Fund).

The group this week released its bi-annual Global Augmented Reality Landscape overview for the first half of the year, finding that the number of qualified AR companies has increased by 50 percent over the last six months. This is likely due to the increased number of AR-capable smartphones as Apple and Google continue to roll out and refine their respective AR platforms (ARKit and ARCore) on iOS and Android. The image below documents all of the companies acknowledged by The VR Fund to be working in the space right now.

That said, the report notes that consumer-level AR apps haven’t seen huge success on the level that Pokemon Go established two years ago now though growth in this sector is still the largest. More growth came in other categories like AR smart glasses, 3D tools and software development kits (SDKs). Social AR is already seeing heavy usage on platforms like Snap and Facebook.

This report arrives after Magic Leap provided the latest look at its anticipated AR headset, Magic Leap One, earlier this week. The device, which is capable of projecting virtual images into real life spaces, plans to start shipping to developers this summer. How will the industry evolve as more hardware finally arrives?

It sounds like you won’t have to worry about the PSVR version of Beat Saber being downgraded from its PC sibling too much.

Speaking to GamesBeat this week, Beat Games CEO Jaroslav Beck noted that the console experience — which was announced at E3 last month — will be very similar to the version Rift and Vive owners are enjoying right now. “We were very surprised that we don’t have to make many changes,” he said. “PlayStation is capable to deliver almost 1-to-1 experience as we have on PC right now.”

Like the PS4 that runs PSVR is capable of amazing VR experiences, it’s not as powerful as most of the PCs that run the Rift and Vive, which means ports of PC VR games to PSVR usually suffer in terms of performance and graphical fidelity. It’s great to hear that Beat Saber might not face the same challenges though, considering the game is simply a set of streaming notes arriving on time with a beat, we’re not too surprised.

It’s also worth noting Beat Saber should work perfectly with PSVR’s 180 degree tracking, too, which is another issue PC VR games usually run into when porting.

Beck also confirmed the PS4 Pro version of the game will render at higher resolution and effects will have more details. Not only that, but the developer is working on “quite of lot” of features that will appear exclusively in the PSVR version of the game. It’s apparently too soon to talk about it, though we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some new tracks were exclusive to this version of the game.

There’s still no word on exactly when Beat Saber will arrive on PSVR but we’re keeping our eyes peeled.

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